Thanks for the link to the researchers report. I read through it in detail and most of what they are saying relates to getting a CD into the car, and accessing the OBD-II port to make code changes. Later in the article they mention bluetooth cellular and RDS as attack vectors but it's not entirely clear (to me) whether these attack vectors only become available after the previous physical access. If the physical access is not necessary then the car they chose is difnitely hackable in the fashion I didn't believe possible, where as if the physical access is necessary then it is essentially as I had suspected. and I put this in the "brake line" category.

The thought of corrupting an OBD-II pass thru or even compromising the PC used in the workshop are certainly realistic and not precursors I had entertained as part of "hacking", but if we add that to the mix then short of not allowing dealers reprogramming access, I don't see the hacking problem going away. And that I believe will never happen without a government directive because it is too convenient and represents too much of a cost savings to them (dealer and vehicle manufacturer).

Miller, a 40-year-old security engineer at Twitter, and Valasek, the 31-year-old director of security intelligence at the Seattle consultancy IOActive, received an $80,000-plus grant last fall from the mad-scientist research arm of the Pentagon known as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to root out security vulnerabilities in automobiles. The duo plans to release their findings and the attack software they developed at the hacker conference Defcon in Las Vegas next month-the better, they say, to help other researchers find and fix the auto industry's security problems before malicious hackers get under the hoods of unsuspecting drivers.

Miller, a 40-year-old security engineer at Twitter, and Valasek, the 31-year-old director of security intelligence at the Seattle consultancy IOActive, received an $80,000-plus grant last fall from the mad-scientist research arm of the Pentagon known as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to root out security vulnerabilities in automobiles. The duo plans to release their findings and the attack software they developed at the hacker conference Defcon in Las Vegas next month-the better, they say, to help other researchers find and fix the auto industry's security problems before malicious hackers get under the hoods of unsuspecting drivers.

Cadillac and BMW are pushing forward driver assist technologies, such as adaptive cruise control and systems that will help you park your car. The BMW will drive itself during a traffic jam on the highway, controlling speed and steering to keep the car in its lane.

We had an incident last year where (supposedly) a guy's car was stuck on 100kph (cruise control??) and supposedly couldn't stop it. It was an auto so aparently he couldn't take it out of gear and I don't know why he didn't turn the ignition off but maybe it was a push button start without that feature. Either way it highlights your mention of people not knowing how to stop a car, and really suggests a kill switch as a useful addition. Re the incident, it was on TV and I didn't see official police reports so it may have been the media let loose on something they didn't understand or not, but kill switch does sound good in the ligth of it.